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Page 1 of 2 Everybody has some small programs that can hardly do without. Well, in my case the programs are not exactly a few good ones but a whole lotta of them and one of the really beloved ones is XnView. I have tried many image browsers over the years and the other two I used for some time were Irfan View and ACDSee but after I was recommended XnView, I almost forgot about the rest.
So, what's it about XnView that makes it a favorite of mine? It is a fast image browser with support of more than 400 graphic file formats, which means that when I encounter a file with a strange extension, it is almost guaranteed that I will be able to open it and view it. The vast galore of extensions includes standard ones like GIF, JPEG, PNG, BMP, TIFF and a myriad of rare ones. XnView opens Adobe PhotoShop and Illustrator files, as well as AutoCAD files, CorelDRAW files, Gimp brushes, icons and patterns, Kodak proprietary files, several PaintShop Pro formats, Spectrum 512 formats, several Ulead formats, cursor and icon files and even audio formats like aif, wav, avi, vfw, and mpg, which is handy for clips and video files. XnView even has a hex view mode, in case you want to see what actually is in the file (or if the file cannot be viewed because there is nothing in it to show). The complete list of formats is very, very long. The list of features of XnView Pocket is not so long (but you will hardly need, let's say, AutoCAD files on your Pocket PC) and includes about 15 input formats. I have not tried the pocket version, so I cannot share personal experience but if you are looking for an image browser for your Pocket PC, have a try. I have not tested all the formats but from what I have tried, I have no reasons to complain. The image quality is high and it beats even commercial programs. XnView is fast even on a relatively slow machine, which is also a factor, especially when dealing with large files. Although the speed of reading and writing depends on the file size, my impression is that even CPU-intensive operations like batch renaming or conversion, or applying different filters are optimized for speed. XnView runs on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, several flavors of BSD, Solaris, etc. Well, to be honest the Windows version has the most features, while the versions for the other platforms currently miss some functionalities, especially some very important file formats, which do not exist for non-Windows platforms. Another disadvantage of XnView is that although it is free for personal and non-commercial use, it is not open source. The free library (GFL SDK) allows developers to use it for image manipulation but a special agreement is required, if the purpose of use is a commercial one.
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